Instead, the FCA said regulators will continue with their "current approach," which simply states that smaller firms need to pay an appropriate (and unspecified) mix of salaries and bonuses.

In practice, Sam Whitaker, a counsel at law firm Shearman & Sterling in London, says this means all firms rated as "tier 3" and below by the FCA won't have to apply the strict EU bonus rules. These firms will still be free to allocate a higher proportion of compensation to bonuses, and to pay a far higher proportion of those bonuses in cash.

Which are these tier 3 firms? Unfortunately, there's no definitive list. The only way of finding out whether a firm is classified as tier 3 or not is to trawl its 'pillar three submissions' with the regulator.

Having done this, we can inform you that some of London's most generous firms fall into the tier three 'pay-as-you-like' category. They include Brevan Howard, Blackrock, Vanguard and Jefferies.

Jefferies hasn't released a Pillar 3 regulatory disclosure for a while. However, its last one, covering the year to November 2014, shows that - on average - each of its 32 London code staff were paid as follows:

More to the point, there was none of the waiting around for five years until bonuses vest that you get in major banks. The last time it made a regulatory filing, Jefferies said it paid its bonuses, "in up-front cash." Jefferies' traders will be relieved to learn that as of today, it's free to continue doing so.